orion

The Last of California

 in Blog  tagged Barnard's Loop / conjunction / M20 / M78 / M8 / Moon/Mars / occultation / orion

No, California isn’t going away, this is just the last photo from my recent trip down there.  This is M78, captured with the SVX80T at f/6, and the ASI1600 camera.  I shot the same target last year with the WO Star71, which has a significantly wider field of view, and also got it from the remote observatory in Australia with a somewhat narrower field of view.  I’ve repeated the effort because none of these captures has been entirely satisfactory.  This one is better than I expected given that it was captured in just 6 hours or so, over the last […]

M78 From the Other Side

 in Blog  tagged Barnard's Loop / dark nebula / M78 / Messier 78 / orion / reflection nebula

As mentioned earlier, I have been waiting (not so patiently) for better weather in Australia to finish collecting image data from M78, a bright reflection nebula in Orion.  It has finally happened, although there were issues with the quality of some frames.  I haven’t yet been able to figure out what caused the problem, but did find a reasonable work-around for it. This was captured from the other side of Earth, but also makes me curious about what M78 would look like from its other side.  In the upper right it appears that there is more bright blue light behind […]

Orion in the Palms

 in Blog  tagged color / G2V star / orion / Sun color / white balance

In an earlier post I shared a photo of these same palm trees with a nearly full moon behind them.  Now that the Moon is gone (until much later tonight), I can compose a shot with a much darker object behind the trees, the Orion constellation (most of it).  The large bright spot in the lower center is the Orion Nebula, and you can just barely see signs of Barnard’s Loop, a large, but very faint semi-circle of red around the left side of Orion. The trees are lit by artificial light.  I don’t know for sure what type of […]

Living in the Dark (but not so cold)

 in Blog  tagged Angelfish / Barnard's Loop / Borrego Springs / California / flame / horsehead / orion / Running Man / Witch Head

I’m back from a short vacation in southern California, most of which was unrelated to astronomy, but we spent a couple of days in Borrego Springs, which is a designated Dark Sky Community.  It’s also in the middle of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, which recently became a Dark Sky Park.  Using what is called a Sky Quality Meter (I call it a “dark meter” – sort of the opposite of a light meter) I got readings of 21.1 to 21.3 around town.  That’s close to the darkness at most of the dark sky sites I go to in the […]

Test Results

 in Blog  tagged canon 6d / m103 / orion / test

I was able to capture some test images last night with the Star71 scope and Canon EOS 6D camera.  These were all unguided captures of 30 seconds duration, manually focused using live view mode.  I got 4 shots of each target and also captured 4 dark frames at each ISO setting (3200 for Orion and 12,800 for M103).  I averaged the dark frames and subtracted them from each light frame, then averaged the light frames (without adjusting their alignment).  Note that the “fog” from light pollution brought the black level up to almost 50%, higher than it should be, and […]

Orion Nebula (M42)

 in Gallery / Nebulae  tagged astro-images / images / nebula / orion

This was one of the first of my astro-photos that I was happy with – about 3 years after I started – and it is still my favorite target. It was captured in late September of 2008, very late at night. The problem with Orion (for those of us living in the northern parts of Earth) is that it is never visible in the summer nights. In late summer it comes up in the east just before sunrise and by spring it sets in the west shortly after sunset. So it’s a great sight in the winter night sky and […]